


to play on the golden harp

by jonphaedrus



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Dream Sex, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 12:20:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: “Bert,” Roland who is both Roland-the-child and Roland-the-man at once says, “Do you ever regret dying?"





	to play on the golden harp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [V_V_lala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_V_lala/gifts).



> happy yuletide, v_v_lala! id never previously considered the potentiality of bert/roland until your prompt but im absolutely in love with it. theyre such good boys!! they deserved better!!! they really, really did!!!!
> 
> i hope this is coming to you on a good and lovely yuletide day!
> 
> [ title from the sacred harp hymnal [the golden harp](http://www.sacredharpbremen.org/lieder/200-bis-299/274t-the-golden-harp)

In his dreams, it’s high summer in Gilead. They all know that the world is going to come to an end and fall into chaos and darkness and agony and bloodshed and strife, but for this one afternoon, with the buzzing cicadas in the trees and the balmy humidity turning the whole world to low lush sweat, it’s a time for lazing in the fields and hiding in the shade.

It’s both before and after Mejis all at the same time. Bert is younger, from before that awful year, but Roland knows he’s survived it, and knows Bert is dead. In that strange logic that dreams have, he can know all this at once, and yet still have it be high summer in Gilead, and still lay sprawled in the tall grass with Cuthbert and watch the clouds scud overhead, white and silver like filigree against the wide ocean blue of the sky, so deep you could almost drown in it.

“Bert,” Roland who is both Roland-the-child and Roland-the-man at once says, “Do you ever regret it?”

“Regret what?” Bert replies, laughing. He has an arrow through his eye, and he reaches up like it’s a fly to swat, pulls it free, tosses it into the grass. Blood trickles down his face from the eyelid, a single line over his cheekbones to his chin, drips into the grass. He lays down beside Roland, their bodies touching from shoulder to ankle. He’s warm. Alive. “I’ve done a lot of stupid shit, Roland. Try and pick a category.”

“Dying,” Roland says, because it is a dream.

Cuthbert goes quiet, and in the silence, Roland listens to his breathing and his heartbeat. He listens to the distant cry of a hawk, some falconry practice up at the training courts. He listens to the whisper of the grass, horse hooves striking the ground. He listens to the cicadas buzz, and above all, the watery  _summer_  sound, something of all those things and yet more, a depth to it that goes past the tangible. It is slow and low and heavy inside him, a beat in the base of his stomach, just behind his cock and balls, that tugs in him. Summer. Childhood.

“Doesn’t seem like it’s much of a thing that you can really make the decision to regret,” Cuthbert says at last. “I mean. Once you die, you’re dead. You don’t normally get a chance to sit there and rethink your decisions and wonder  _did I really do the right thing, there at the end_?” Cuthbert shrugs, their shoulders brushing with the motion. “But for what it’s worth, no, I don’t.”

Roland closes his eyes. “This is a dream.”

Cuthbert laughs. “Could have told you that. You weren’t nearly this tall your last summer in Gilead. Shorter hair, too. You need to trim it.” He does—he keeps forgetting to. There’s not really a point, in all honesty. It gets lice no matter the length, these days. He doesn’t need his eyes to aim. It’s some nice shade, even. “Did you think I would say I regretted it, leaving you alone?”

Roland says nothing, because he had hoped, at least in his dreams, that he could beg Cuthbert to stay.

He’s lived a very long time, now. Longer without Cuthbert than with.  _Exponentially_  longer, even. But the loss of Cuthbert all those years ago, hearing the dying strains of the Horn of Eld as his body failed, has stayed with him the way only one other thing has. Sometimes, he hears the horn in other things. The creak of old machinery. Gunfire. In Eddie Dean’s world, in car horns, and radios. The sound is ever-present, straining against Roland’s seams and threatening sometimes to tear him apart. It shreds him, grinds sand in under his eyelids.

He hears Cuthbert blowing that horn in his nightmares, which have haunted him to a night for years he cannot even count, since time has slowed down and gotten strange. That horn, that old horn, blowing clear and loud and Final, and under it the slow and heartbeat pace chant of  _charyou tree, charyou tree_.

“I wish I could make you, even in my dreams.” Roland opens his eyes, and turns to look at Cuthbert. Cuthbert grins back at him, and they’re both young. Mejis-young, handsome and untried and stupid. Not that any of them every really got any  _less_  stupid. They just got better at faking it. Even in time uncounted, Roland has never gotten much less stupid.

It’s a constant. It is one of the few constants. He’s always going to be fucking stupid, just like every other human. It’s a nice thing to hang onto, in this bullshit impossible dying world.

“I miss you,” Roland says, and he’s never said the words aloud outside of his dreams. They are the truest things he can know to say about another person. “I miss you terribly, Bert.”

Cuthbert takes his hand, and rolls over, presses his face into Roland’s shoulder. Roland pulls him close, arm around his waist, and feels Bert’s breath on the side of his neck, the slope of his chest. (They’re naked now, sweat-slick and panting, their cocks soft and spent against their bellies, cum painting Roland’s thighs, gasping to get their breath and balance back, lost in the worlds that are one another.) He has missed this. He misses this. Bert’s hand flattens over the top of his stomach, thumb brushing the base of his ribcage.

Neither of them says anything. Roland knows this is a dream, because it’s fall now, rain scattering the sky above them, pattering down on their faces and bodies. Steaming a little, into mist and fog, but he’s not cold. He’s still warm, still tangled naked with Bert as the rain picks up, pounding around them, a cacophany of drops that could drown the world, that cut off everything. The sky is leaden grey, the grass and trees bow and duck and stoop to protect their necks, and Cuthbert and Roland lay there like it’s the end of the world.

It smells like Jericho Hill did.

Blood.

“You have to move on someday, Roland.” Bert’s breath is a hot puff on the side of his neck. “You’ve either got now until eternity or now until the end of time, one or the other. Sometime in there you have to move on.” Roland doesn’t want to move on. “I know Susan wouldn’t want you to mourn forever. I don’t want you to either.” Roland wonders if the real Cuthbert would say that, or just the one he carries with him like a thorn dug deep into his side, so deep he doesn’t know any more where the thorn ends and he begins. “Miss me all you want, Deschain, but sooner or later, let me go. You’re already carrying the weight of your ka-tet’s souls with you into whatever hell it is that’ll come upon you between now and the end of all things; you shouldn’t carry me with you too.”

“I want to.”

Roland doesn’t realize he’s saying the words until they’re said, and then he closes his mouth, because he may as well accept he’s done a thing once he’s gone and done it.

“I  _want_  to,” he says it again. “If I don’t, who will? If I don’t remember you, who will?”

“Then remember this,” Cuthbert says, sitting up, straddling one of Roland’s thighs, their knees and ankles knocking, his hair hanging down into Roland’s face. They’re young again. After Mejis, before Jericho Hill. Somewhere in thise middle, indeterminate years. “Remember  _this_. Remember rolling in the hay, and stripping from our jeans so fast we’d hurt ourselves. Don’t remember Jericho Hill.”

Roland lifts his hand, presses his thumb over Cuthbert’s eye—the one his corpse hadn’t had.

And Cuthbert leans down to kiss him

And the grass smells like summer

And he can hear the horn

And

  


  


  


Roland wakes up. Try as he might, he can’t hear the horn at Jericho Hill.

Not in the creak of old machinery. Not in gunfire. Not in car horns, radios.

Not at all.


End file.
